Heft 04 / Oktober 2014

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Summary:

Foundational Research Or More Than A Mere Experiment? Boris Blacher’s Ornaments for Piano as the Founding Certificate of Variable Meter – In 1950, Boris Blacher developed the method known as »variable meter«: the basic idea was the organisation of rhythmic structure according to combinatorial series with constant time changes. Blacher’s Ornaments for Piano is generally considered a piece of basic methodological research for this technique, an »exercise«. Yet these seven short piano pieces, no least in the context of a multi-movement work, very much form an autonomous piece with its own musical value. Previous examinations of the pieces purely with reference to the periodic ordering principles used in them fail to do justice to that value. Starting from an art-historical definition of the term »ornament«, the subsequent analysis asks where and how this novel principle orders and subdivides the structure of the composition – and thus its musical content – rather than overrunning it.

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